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Question

I am updating the description to provide more information about the problem. Any suggestions for resolution are welcome.

The Problem

When attempting to update a Microsoft Office file in place on either SharePoint or merely using an IIS website, the save operation returns a user-visible “Unable to connect to the web server” message in a dialogue box. The underlying network trace indicates an error 500 with a supplemental error description of “%1 is not a valid Win32 application.” This network trace error is consistent across all manifestations (see below).

This problem did not exist until approximately November 2007. We had been running without incident with MOSS 2007 Enterprise edition, fully licensed since approximately May 2007. We upgraded to MOSS 2007 SP1 about a month ago, which exposed Manifestations 7 and 8 (did not occur pre-SP1).

This problem does NOT occur with text files edited by Notepad.

This problem does NOT occur on a WSS 3.0 server we have installed, using the same clients and client software.

We have confirmed this behavior in the following environments across a random sampling of 1000 people in the company:

·Client: Windows XP SP2, Office 2003

·Client: Windows XP SP2, Office 2007 (upgrade from Office 2003)

·Client Office Server 2003 R2, Office 2007

Our server environment is a small farm:

·1 web server running MOSS 2007 Enterprise SP1

·1 database server running SQL Server 2000 SP4

·Windows Server 2003 R2, IIS 6.0, latest service packs

Manifestations

1.When attempting to edit a file in place, the system returns an error on save “Unable to connect to the web server”. Variant 1.

a.Open a browser window in any document library on any site collection.

b.Hover over a Microsoft Office file (any type) until the context menu appears.

c.Select Edit in Microsoft xxx.

d.Make any changes desired to the file.

e.Click Save.

f.The error occurs.

2.When attempting to edit a file in place, the system returns an error on save “Unable to connect to the web server”. Variant 2.

a.Open a browser window in any document library on any site collection.

b.Click on the file in question.

i.In Office 2007, users are prompted to either open for read only or edit. Select Edit.

ii.In Office 2003, users are not prompted but the file is opened in read-only mode.

c.Make any changes desired to the file.

d.Click Save.

i.In Office 2007, the error occurs.

ii.In Office 2003, because it is a read-only file now, the system requests users to save the file to a new name.

3.When attempting to edit a file in place, the system returns an error on save “Unable to connect to the web server”. Variant 3.

a.Open a browser window in any document library on any site collection.

b.Click Actions->Open in Windows Explorer.

c.Open any Microsoft Office file.

d.Make any changes desired to the file.

e.Click Save.

f.The error occurs.

4.When attempting to edit a file in place, the system returns an error on save “Unable to connect to the web server”. Variant 4.

a.Map a drive to any document library on any site collection.

b.Navigate to the mapped drive and open any Microsoft Office file.

c.Make any changes desired to the file.

d.Click Save.

e.The error occurs.

5.Cannot save files in My Network Places that point to SharePoint document libraries.

a.Open My Network Places.

b.Click Add a network place.

c.Click Next.

d.Select Choose another network location and click Next.

e.Type in the URL of a any document library on SharePoint and click Next.

f.Name the network place and click Next.

g.Click Finish.

h.Open the network place just created.

i.Open any Microsoft Office file.

j.Make any changes desired to the file.

k.Click Save.

l.The error occurs.

6.Check-in/check-out does not work when using local drafts folder.

a.Open a browser window in any document library on any site collection.

b.Hover over a Microsoft Office file (any type) until the context menu appears.

c.Select Check-out.

d.Make sure the Use my local drafts folder is enabled and click OK.

e.The file is correctly checked out and copied to the local drafts folder.

f.Open the file and make any changes desired to the file.

g.Click Save.

h.Notice that no check-in option is available from the Microsoft Office client.

i.Close the application.

j.Return to the browser and locate the checked out file.

k.Hover over the file until the context menu appears.

l.Select Check-in.

m.At the check-in screen, click OK.

n.When prompted you are about to upload a file, click Yes.

o.The system returns an error: “This document was checked out to your local drafts folder but the local copy could not be checked in to the site. Close any application that is editing the document and try to check in again, or discard the checkout.” There really is no option but to discard the checkout. When the checkout is discarded, the file is deleted along with any changes made by the user.

b.If the default site points to a SharePoint site, the system returns an error: “The server could not complete your request. Contact your Internet service provider or web server administrator to make sure that the sever has the FrontPage Server Extensions or SharePoint services installed.”

·This is not a network or firewall problem (ran client software locally on the server)

·This is not a permissions problem (running as any user, including administrators have this problem)

·This is not a client problem (occurs on all clients throughout the company regardless of configuration or client version)

·This is not an API-visible SharePoint configuration problem (nothing we changed appears to have had any effect)

·This is PROBABLY NOT a SharePoint problem (same behavior on IIS-only website)

·This is PROBABLY:

oA file was renamed, deleted or moved

oA file is corrupt

oA registry entry is corrupt or changed

oA path was reset

Suggestion

The likely way to correct the problem is to walk through the operations these applications perform in the manifestations above and determine what they call at these points. I do not have access to your source code to check this for myself. I imagine you do. If the error 500 is returning a valid error (%1 is not a valid Win32 application), then I imagine we will discover a single setting or file is the culprit. If the error 500 is just a default error, then we will have at least isolated the problem to what these ten manifestations have in common and can work from there.

Answers

I finally spoke to a member of Microsoft SharePoint's Advanced Support organization today. He was able to resolve my problem in about an hour. This, after about three and an half months being bounced around the regular support organization with people who did not know what they were doing. Microsoft regular support knows only to look into knowledgebases, not really exercise much in the way of diagnostic or debugging ability.

Here was the actual problem:

On the front-end web server, somehow the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\ISAPI\_VTI_AUT directory and its contents had gone missing. Fortunately I had another server running WSS 3.0 and we were able to copy the files across. It also turned out that one of the files an earlier support engineer had given me to debug the problem (SHTML.DLL) was faulty, so we replaced this file as well.

I have tested all my use cases and everything appears to work fine!

I wish I had been able to speak with this fellow in January when I first filed the problem.

I wish there were something in the logs. Unfortunately, even with tracing turned on, there appears to be no correlated log event for this failure. This suggests to me (and I will admit vast ignorance in this area), that the problem occurs between the client and some level of IIS rather than touching SharePoint proper.

We've got the same problem. The users are using Vista and Office 2007. But if you have Vista and Office 2003 or Windows XP and Office 2003 there are no problems to open/edit/save the documents into SharePoint. So is this somehow Office 2007 specific - cause it does not allow those applications to the required tasks?

Actually, your problem may be related but it is not quite the same. The problem exists for XP/Office 2003, XP/Office 2007 as well. We have only an handful of Vista users in the company and I imagine the problem exists for them as well.

I seem to recall Microsoft writing up something about difficulties with Vista and this combination but it was in relation to form-based authentication I think. I am not sure this will be of any value but here is the link: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977430.aspx

We have been working with Microsoft support on this for over two weeks now. It is not yet resolved. The good news is that we have practically eliminated SharePoint itself and any client configurations from the problem. It appears that something on the server or in ISS has changed that causes this behaviour.

We encountered this error last week. We tried several steps but to no avail. Yesterday, we re-installed MS Office and the problem no longer occurs. This solves the problem in our side. Hope this helps.

I am glad you resolved the problem. Unfortunately ours is different. We have approximately 800 clients who all started experiencing the problem simultaneously. This suggested a server-based problem rather than a client issue. Further, we installed a fresh copy of MS Office on a clean machine and were still unable to do make progress. This suggests to me the problem is something in IIS.

Into week 7 of having placed a paid support call into Microsoft, the problem still persists. I am underwhelmed by the technical acumen of the case engineer, the responsiveness of Microsoft or the ability to even get a simple, pre-arranged callback.

Now into week eight and no resolution. I did confirm that the engineer who was assigned the case hadn't worked on it for weeks despite my persistent pinging. I guess the only way to get anything fixed is to hire a consultant...

It is frustrating since I have about 900 people waiting for the system to roll out. There are rumblings we should move document management to Oracle at this stage, since Microsoft seems unable to support their own product. I am trying to convince them otherwise but it is difficult.

Can anyone recommend a diagnostic consultant for SharePoint who might be able to look into this?

Are you doing anything with offline files? I'm starting to think my problem might be caused by Vista's issues with offline files. We have our SharePoint Drafts folder pointing to a mapped network drive. I have the folder setup for offline file sync. Turns out Vista's having known problems with offline files. I'm thinking that might be causing my issue, though I think you mentioned only a small % of your users are on Vista.

The problem is not OS-related. We have tried using Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista, all with the same results. What we do know is that the problem only occurs with Microsoft Office applications and files (text files work fine for example), so the problem is somehow related to an handshake the server makes with Office: Office does not recognize the server as being available.

The problem also manifests itself in Windows SharePoint Designer, which is frustrating since I haven't been able to edit any pages or workflows in two months.

I finally spoke to a member of Microsoft SharePoint's Advanced Support organization today. He was able to resolve my problem in about an hour. This, after about three and an half months being bounced around the regular support organization with people who did not know what they were doing. Microsoft regular support knows only to look into knowledgebases, not really exercise much in the way of diagnostic or debugging ability.

Here was the actual problem:

On the front-end web server, somehow the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\ISAPI\_VTI_AUT directory and its contents had gone missing. Fortunately I had another server running WSS 3.0 and we were able to copy the files across. It also turned out that one of the files an earlier support engineer had given me to debug the problem (SHTML.DLL) was faulty, so we replaced this file as well.

I have tested all my use cases and everything appears to work fine!

I wish I had been able to speak with this fellow in January when I first filed the problem.

Thank you for responding. No, this was not the problem. It turned out that some of the files on my web server had gone missing. I do not know why, but when these were replaced, everything started to work again.

Experaincing a similar problem here, my symptoms were exactly as described.Vlad. Thanks for posting your resolution, I'd never have managed to get to the bottom of this ortherwise.In my case the '_VTI_AUT' folder (and its contents) still existed ok but tried restoring SHTML.dll from an older copy as suggested. After running an iisreset, everything picked up as normal, check in/out from both Office2007 and 2003 are now working perfectly.Once again, thanks for the info, very much appreciated.QZ

We are having a similar kind of problem as well but a bit different in the same time as well.

What happen is that our MOSS server will work for a while, but sometimes when a person check-in a document, it will hang the whole server and then complain that the document is not checked-out or checked-out by another person when in fact, the person checking in is the same as the person who checked it out!

This will happen once a while.

Any ideas?

Also I'm interested in knowing what contents do you have under the '_VTI_AUT' folder?Currently I can only see AUTHOR.DLL and SHTML.DLL is in the folder one level up. Is this still corrent?

It seems when XP users with Office 07 try to modify a document in MOSS 07, the document is opened in read only. I have tried the RegEdit Microsoft suggests and also applying a recent patch. Still a no go.

When a any user (XP/Vista) tries uploading an infopath form they recieve the error:

The form template cannot be opened, because the system administrator has

disabled opening form templates that require full trust.

As far as the '_VTI_AUT' folder, I can only see AUTHOR.DLL and SHTML.DLL is in the folder one level up, just like DePatrick.

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